Thursday, February 22, 2018

The Russians are coming –
for real. And they’ll meddle in our November elections.

After all, it worked for
them in 2016.

“There should be no doubt
that Russia perceives its past efforts as successful and views the 2018 midterm
elections as a potential target for Russian influence operations,” Dan Coats,
the director of national intelligence, told the Senate Intelligence Committee Feb.
13.

“We expect Russia to
continue using propaganda, social media, false-flag personas, sympathetic
spokespeople and other means of influence to try to exacerbate social and
political fissures in the United States,” Coats said.

Even President Donald
Trump now concedes Russians interfered in the last presidential election,
though he still cannot bring himself to criticize Russian President Vladimir
Putin. Authorities agree there’s no evidence vote tallies were altered, but
it’s impossible to know how many minds were changed.

Russia’s goal is to sow fear, distrust, discord and divisiveness in
America and elsewhere and restore Russia’s role as a world power, experts say. Russians
have
been successfully pushing our emotional buttons for years, using social media.

Most recently, after the
massacre in Parkland, Florida, they used #guncontrolnow and #gunreformnow to
stir the pot. They used similar tactics following
the mass shootings in Las Vegas and Texas.

Russians began posing as Americans in social media, creating false
stories and spewing tweets, in 2014. These were trial runs to see how much they
could get Americans to believe, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday
after an extensive investigation.

We take the bait -- as the tale of the tainted turkey demonstrates.

Around Thanksgiving 2015, someone claiming to be Alice Norton, a
31-year-old mother of two in New York City, wrote on a cooking website forum
that her whole family had gotten food poisoning from a Walmart turkey. Twitter
repeated the claim thousands of time, and a news story reported 200 people were
in critical condition at hospitals.

The story was a hoax. There was no such outbreak of food poisoning, the
Journal reported. The claims were linked to a Kremlin propaganda agency charged
with meddling in U.S. elections by Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The tainted turkey was just one of several fictitious events Russian
propagandists manufactured before they moved on to support Trump and Bernie
Sanders while disparaging Hillary Clinton, the Journal said.

The United States continues to be “under attack” by those who want to
create cyber disruption, Coats and other intelligence officials warned. Our
response?

“We’ve had more than a year to get our act together and address the
threat posed by Russia and implement a strategy to deter future attacks,” Sen. Mark
Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said at the
hearing. “We still do not have a plan.”

Attorney General Jeff
Sessions announced a Cyber-Digital Task Force Tuesday to study what the Justice
Department is doing to combat global security threats. Interference in our
elections is one priority.

That’s good, as far as it
goes.

Social media companies are shutting down Russian bots, the automated
accounts that flood tweets and posts, but as soon as one account is gone,
others pop up.

If we can’t rely on the government or corporations to stop the flow of
misinformation by November, if ever, what can we do?

Three words: Consider the source.

That’s what my mother said when I was a child and a bully said or did
something ugly. Consider the source means don’t pay attention to someone whose
opinion doesn’t matter.

Now more than ever we need to know if the source of information is
credible. Don’t rely on Wikipedia or your friends to have their facts straight.

To recognize bots, experts suggest checking an account’s bio and profile
picture. If the language is odd, if you Google the image and find it all over
the Internet, if the “person” tweets more than seems humanly possible – move
on. Don’t share it.

We need to cultivate more good old American skepticism. Propaganda works
because it plays to our existing distrust and divisions. Recognize when you
love or hate something online it may be because it confirms your bias. We all
have them.

This election year, look before you retweet. Don’t be played for a
sucker.